“I would have done the same for you. I would have risked my life to save you without a second thought. No way in hell could anyone have stopped me from trying to protect what I love. I admire him so much for what he did. He’s a damn good man.”
“Maybe I should give her Bingo.”
We sit there silently for a long time.
“You wanna go out to lunch with your daddy, Ava girl?”
“No. Maybe we can order in.” She leans over and starts going through the pile.
?
After a beat, we’re actually having a good time looking through all the boxes. She’s finally smiling and asking a million questions, and as I continue to toss things, she fishes some out of the bags and decides to keep most of it, in digital form.
She begins taking pictures of everything and has decided she’s going to download them and put them on a disk.
“Clear out the clutter,” I said.
“Organize the memories,” she countered.
“Grandma K kept all this stuff?” She laughs when she holds up the blanket of all the T-shirts made into a quilt.
“Kept well, huh?” I didn’t want to tell her that my mother didn’t keep shit. I did. And I didn’t want to tell her the quilt was a graduation present from my first love, Tessa Ross.
“This is so cool.” She stands and flings open the quilt. Then sits on it and points to my right. “Give me that bin.”
Ava’s tearing through all the bins and having a great time, momentarily distracted from reality. She keeps my pile of ball caps, all the white ones, and football jerseys.
She opens another bin and grabs a photo album, one of all my senior year highlights. Another thing Tessa gave me.
She smiles when she sees Tommy and me shirtless in front of my pool.
“Damn, Dad, you were hot stuff.”
“Yeah, some things don’t change, huh?” I wink.
“Oh my God! Is that Luke’s dad?”
“Sure is. Tommy, my best friend for years.”The good and bad ones.
“So, Jade was doing him then?”
“Ava,” I warn.
“Okay, are you gonna keep trying to convince me the stork is real, too?”
“Hell yes, I am!”
We both laugh.
“Luke looks just like him.”
“Spitting image of his father.”
She turns the pages until she comes to the obituary. Tommy died in a car accident our senior year in high school, not knowing that his girlfriend, Jade, was pregnant.
“Does it still hurt, Daddy?”
I nod.